My objective for “The Monstrous Feminist” was not to “convert” feminists into horror fans, although that did sometimes happen, but to open up horizons for both horror and feminisms. Firstly, I wanted to offer horror as a site of critical reflection to students who might be unaccustomed to combining their feminism with film or literary theory and cultural studies. Secondly, I wanted to expand on well-known feminist theoretical analyses that seemed to lock feminisms into perpetual struggle with horror, raising intriguing questions of gendered spectatorship. In what follows, I will briefly review a few of these theories in discussing the experiences of the “Monstrous Feminists,” who repeatedly demonstrated that the feminist classroom can engender interpretive strategies beyond the scope of the “male gaze” first conceptualized by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey’s influential essay tends to exclude the possibility of a gaze that is not only acutely aware of what horror does with and to women, but also of what feminists might do with and to horror.

I suggest having a read. It’s fascinating overall to read how this incredible class functioned and, clearly, thrived (still thrives, I hope, if not this semester, then another soon), but equally fascinating (and stemming off into a thousand different directions of thought) are the concepts considered within the class. I wish (and you do, too, admit it) that I’d had this class as a choice during my undergrad and/or grad years. Honestly, it’s amazing where your thought processes can go when you stop considering females in horror (whether in front of, or behind, the camera) as defined strictly by the male gaze, or by the female gaze as influenced by the all-powerful male gaze. These women, and horror in general, open up significantly if you consider these characters and filmmakers as operating under their own volition and with their very own sets of ideas. Wonderful.